What secularists never understand is that human dignity is not centred on our desire to be free from all external constraints. Instead, the great dignity of the human person is about our yearning for truth and our ability to seek and find that truth. 

No glory comes from falsehood unless, despite one’s best efforts to find truth, one falls short. There is no right to do whatever one pleases in the name of liberty, especially if the exercise of one’s autonomy means violating the rights of others. 

However, true human dignity often carries a burden – the responsibility to submit to the truth and goodness that stand above one’s personal desires. We possess an innate dignity that comes with being created in God’s image and likeness. Yet we defile that dignity through sin and the failure to repent. Conversely, we can enhance our dignity through truth-seeking and virtuous living.

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Quebec Premier Francois Legault appears to be unaware of the religious roots of human rights and dignity with his plan to introduce legislation abolishing the right to public prayer in that province. He has got it backwards – human dignity does not mean a right to insulate oneself from those who practise religious rituals but rather a responsibility to seek religious truth. 

Legault believes he has found truth in the dogma that if there is a God, that God is a private matter and He should not show his face in public. The premier has a right to hold this dogma, but he has no right to bar others from upholding their claims to religious truth. The common good requires that the human conscience be free to pursue truth and that people have a right to express their truth claims to the public. We also have a right to worship and to bring our pleas before God in public. Anything less is unvarnished authoritarianism. 

To be sure, there are numerous claims to religious truth, which often contradict one another. For too long, the Catholic Church repressed the beliefs of other religions and the people who upheld them with the proclamation, “error has no rights.” The Second Vatican Council adopted a more enlightened approach, respecting other religions, promoting interreligious dialogue and issuing a declaration on the right to religious freedom. Pope John Paul II moved this teaching into practice with visits to the sacred places of other religions and his 1986 religious summit at Assisi, Italy. 

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In its teaching on other religions, Vatican II also declared that the Catholic Church “has a high regard for the manner of life and conduct, the precepts and doctrines which, although differing in many respects from its own teaching, nevertheless often reflect a ray of that truth which enlightens all men and women.”

The way forward to peace and deeper spiritual understanding comes through dialogue, not the repression of those who hold different beliefs. All humanity can benefit from discussions about the nature and content of religious truth.

It is precisely such dialogue that demagogues want to curtail. They seek control over every aspect of human endeavour, especially people’s hearts and minds. Indeed, what demagogues fear most is the truth that can in turn be used to critique the inhumanities committed by the despot. It was the inability of the Soviet regime and its puppet regimes in Eastern Europe to control people’s consciences that led to the downfall of that mighty empire a mere 35 years ago.

With that in mind, I must disagree with Trois-Rivieres Bishop Martin Laliberte’s comment, “Prayer is not dangerous.” Prayer is dangerous to those who put power above justice and right. Prayer calls upon God to bring his reign to fruition in this world. Prayer forms consciences in the truth, a truth which threatens the demagogue. Praying is what the Virgin Mary was doing when she praised God, “who cast down the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly.”

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Joseph Stalin once dismissed the power of the Church with the comment, “How many divisions has the pope?” The Church does not need military divisions when it forms more than one billion consciences in the truth. 

Truth and the power of conscience are what Legault seeks to repress. He will trot out the notwithstanding clause once again, and that bypass of human dignity and rights will serve his purposes for a while. However, it will not hold. Tin pot dictators are no match for the human yearning for what is true and good.